


Nemesis

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Healing, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-29 18:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16269722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Colleen Wing after season 2. For my h/c bingo square "job-related trauma."





	Nemesis

**Author's Note:**

> I think I might've fudged the timeline a bit (I got the impression that Season 2 actually does take place somewhere around Chinese New Year; here I'm treating it as a month or two before) but I don't think it's explicitly stated anywhere.

The cat's name is Nemesis. Misty is the one who names it, semi-accidentally, after a soft tap-tap on the window interrupts a few too many late-night beers at Colleen's apartment. Misty watches with bleary-eyed bemusement as Colleen shoves up the window a few inches and sets out a pan of chicken scraps that she obtained earlier from the dishwasher at the restaurant down the street. The cat has vanished, but after she shuts the window, Colleen sees stealthy movement as it creeps back.

"Feeding stray cats now?" Misty asks as Colleen gets them out two more beers, even though she knows they'll both hate themselves in the morning.

"Just the one." 

"Soft touch," Misty says in amusement, taking the beer after Colleen pops the top off in the kitchen.

"I am not," Colleen fires back, thinking _Damn it_ because yeah, she is. She always has been: a sucker for kids in trouble, for crime victims, for dumb martial arts virtuosos with curly blond hair and an innocence the world never quite managed to strip away.

"Face it, Wing, every superhero needs a nemesis and you've found yours -- orphans and stray kittens."

Colleen chokes on her beer, laughing. "I'm not a superhero!"

"Yeah? You got superpowers and you stay out all night helping people. Sounds like it to me." Misty glances over at the window as a gray ghost flickers off the windowsill. "How long has this been going on?"

"Just a couple of months." She saw the cat for the first time a few days after Danny left, a skin-and-bones stray with fur that looked like it had been run through a washing machine filled with ditchwater. At first there was just the occasional dish of scraps on the balcony, but slowly but surely the feedings have become a regular nightly thing, to the point where the cat makes its presence known with paw-taps on the window when it comes around. It won't let her pet it or even get close to it, but she doesn't really want to. She's not really in a mood right now for getting close to things.

"Hey, that's new," Misty remarks, gesturing with her beer at the postcard of city towers stuck to the fridge with a banana-shaped magnet.

"Kuala Lumpur," Colleen says. Under the heavy sleeve of her sweater, the tattoo itches; she rubs at it with her thumb. "I am not going to ask what they're doing there."

"Good life choice."

 

***

 

"Colleen, guess where we are!" The view on her phone of a hectic street scene rotates in a dizzying swoop, showing her flashes of color and light, flowers and fans and good-luck red lanterns everywhere. It eventually swings back around to Danny, grinning at her, with Ward looking incredibly put-upon behind him.

"Somewhere in China?" she guesses, rolling over on her bed and holding the phone above her.

"Beijing! I figured we had to come here for New Year's. Ward's never seen a real one, just the New York version." He's having to yell over the noise.

"And how are you enjoying it?" Colleen asks, grinning up at the phone. Danny obligingly holds the phone in Ward's direction.

"Better than being chased through Jakarta by gangsters," Ward remarks. He's wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up, hands shoved in his pockets. In spite of looking vaguely uncomfortable and out of place at the moment, he's smiling a little bit. He's been seeming steadily more relaxed and laid back and more ... well ... happy, ever since he has been turning up in Danny's regular Skype calls to her from their Tour De Fist. She actually kind of likes him now, though she hopes it doesn't show. Ward strikes her as the sort of guy who needs to be kept off balance a little bit.

Also, Misty keeps asking her for status updates on "tall, dark, and sassy." She's not sure how worried she should be about that.

"Gotta go. I'll put photos on Instagram," Danny says, as the view rotates back to his grinning face.

"You're such a tourist," Colleen tells him, laughing, and disconnects.

She lies there for a minute, gazing at the phone, where Danny's face has been replaced by her own reflection, and thinks about six thousand miles, and choices, and roads not taken, and the fact that if she got on a plane tonight, she could be in Beijing a day later.

Then she gets up and grabs her katana and heads out onto the streets.

 

***

 

Nemesis comes into Colleen's dojo/apartment on a warm spring day when she has the windows open. She looks up from sweeping the floor and there it is, a gray ghost a little less skinny than it used to be, with a crooked tail and a ragged left ear, very cautiously tiptoeing across the back of the sofa.

She stays still and quiet for a few minutes, not wanting to scare it off, but she can't just stand here all day, so eventually she goes back to sweeping, and the cat continues its cautious investigations. It prefers to stay under or behind things; she catches occasional glimpses as it ghosts around the baseboards.

"You better not bring fleas in here," she tells it.

The cat vanishes instantly at the sound of her voice, but she doesn't see it at the window, so it's still in the apartment somewhere.

She has to get to her afternoon shift at the community center, so Colleen slices up part of a chicken breast she was thawing for dinner and leaves the thin slices in a dish on the windowsill and the windows open when she leaves.

 

***

 

The tattoo on her arm still hurts occasionally, even now, months after any physical damage would have healed. She sometimes wakes from strange, vivid dreams: dragons and caves and faceless gods in robes of embroidered silks.

She understands, now, why Danny found the Iron Fist so addictive and hard to control. But she's always had anger like fire under her skin. She controls it, shapes it, fashions it according to her will. In a way it makes it easier that she's able to externalize it into a pure white flame. 

She experiments with that fire, incorporating it into her daily training routine. She has been using the katana for so long that it feels like an extension of her body, and the day she realizes that she can channel dragon's fire into the katana should, perhaps, have felt like an epiphany, but instead it simply feels natural, as if she should have known she could do this all along.

The other thing she is beginning to understand is what it had meant for Danny to give it up, and why he had to go away. As much as she tells herself that she was herself before it, and will still be herself if she lost it tomorrow, it feels as if the flame fills a place inside her that has been dark and empty for her entire life, illuminating her soul with white-hot light.

It doesn't matter how many times she tells herself that it's a false sense of fulfillment; the feeling is still real. The flame wraps around her soul and she warms herself in its heat while also trying hard to remind herself not to burn up in its sun.

 

***

 

"Nice ink," Claire remarks, the first time they get together for drinks after Colleen finds out her friend is back in town, when Colleen takes off her jacket. She's experimenting with short sleeves again; the weather is getting too warm for sweaters. "Is that a dragon?"

Colleen flexes her hand and feels something ripple invisibly under her skin. "Let me tell you about it."

 

***

 

She has two dates with a volunteer at the center, an American-born son of North Korean refugees. He's sweet and kind and great in bed, and he's a business major at NYU when he's not volunteering, and she lets him do most of the talking because she has no idea what to say to him. She can't talk to him about dragons or the Hand or nighttime vigils on the rooftops of Chinatown; she can't tell him where she got the bruise on her forehead where a teenage thug clipped her with a chain, or why she wakes up gasping and holding the tattoo on her arm the one night she spends at his place.

He's also allergic to cats. She tells herself that's why it didn't work out.

 

***

 

In the humid heart of July, with the air conditioning unit rattling in the window of her bedroom but doing little more than move the heat around, Danny Skypes her from Manila. He looks like hell -- his face discolored with bruises, a bandage above his eye. Ward's arm is in a sling. They both look cheerful as hell, which is annoying.

"You should see the other guys," Danny tells her.

"You're supposed to be keeping him _out_ of trouble," she tells Ward, irritated.

"Pot, kettle," Ward retorts dryly, and she remembers too late her split lip and the black eye she picked up two nights ago that's now turning twelve shades of technicolor bruising.

"You're right," she sighs. "The three of us together don't have enough common sense to fill a teaspoon. We all need a responsible adult to look after us."

Danny laughs, and Ward puts on a disgruntled expression that's clearly fake, with a bright gleam of humor in it. She really does like him better now. Danny is good for him.

"How are you, anyway?" she asks Danny. "I don't mean ..." She gestures to her own face, indicating the bruises. "Are you finding what you're looking for?"

"I think so," Danny says after a minute, and then he looks at her with that too-insightful expression, the way his bright blue eyes can see right through her sometimes. "You?"

"Yeah," she says, reaching out a hand to scratch the mangled ears of the gray cat laying beside her on the bed. The tattoo curls dark around her wrist, and she's long since stopped wearing long sleeves to cover it up. "Yeah, I think I am." 

"You know," Danny says, a little too casually, "we're going to be in Manila for awhile -- you and I never did get to the Philippines when we were over here before, so I haven't ever been here, and Ward hasn't either. We kinda wanted to see some of the sights. And, you know, heal up a bit."

"Yeah?" It's an offer, but a gentle one: not a hand clasped tightly so she can't get away, but one offered palm-open. She thinks about letting it go. Thinks about roads not taken, and second chances. Wonders if she could get Misty to come over and feed the cat. "You know, I've got some time off coming to me at the center. Do you think you could pick me up at the airport?"

Danny's grin is blinding, and God, she missed that sunshine smile. "Yeah. Yeah, I could do that."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Nemesis by Sholio (Podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19830709) by [MissIzzy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissIzzy/pseuds/MissIzzy)




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